Monday, 22 May 2017

Harvest Monday...and a bit of Sweden

I've been away for a few days (actually nine days...in Sweden!). So my previous post involved harvests just before we left and this week are harvests since we've been back. My radish gamble paid off (giving them a water to bring the growth on, and harvesting those ready just before the hol. On our return, there are loads at just the right size, and I haven't seen any yet which are too big or woody (there was a bit of a chickweed explosion in that bed though, so it needs a good weed).

They've been going nicely in sandwiches, here with some red onion top snippings, from a few spare onion sets I'm growing in a pot in the back garden. I never have any luck with salad onions, so this is a good equivalent.

That's it for the harvest photos, though I have also picked two big bagfuls of chard... I'm starting to clear the beds for squashes and brassicas etc that I have growing on at home. I also picked a nice handful of brassica flowers (similar to purple sprouting broccoli but from a cabbage plant I harvested the cabbage from ages ago. It's actually been really prolific, and was from a self seeded plant..bonus). That'll be the last though I reckon.

And as a sign of the upcoming summer...today I harvested our first strawberry! We were both at the allotment yesterday trying to get things back on track and Jan spied a strawberry partly ripe. So she turned it over for the other side to get the sun today (it's been very warm) and when I was dropping off some grass clippings there after a gardening job this afternoon...yes it was ready. Being a kindly person, although tempted to eat it there and then, I brought it home and we had half each!

So yes, we have just been to Sweden...brilliant. Stockholm, Gotland and Uppsala. We packed loads in and even managed to visit a couple of botanic gardens. Spring is later there, so although there were plenty of lovely spring flowers, and trees bursting leaves, there were empty beds waiting to be filled. Here's part of (one of the) botanic gardens in Uppsala (east Sweden)...

Garlic area

Quite a few raised beds with no edging, I'm doing this on a smaller scale on my allotment.

Nice compost bin

Hot bed using straw bales and old windows

Crops doing well under the glass.

Beehives....We saw quite a few in various places we visited.

A few shots from further afield...medieval town wall in Visby on the island of Gotland

'Chimpanzee rock' near Visby (though looks more like a gorilla)

Fishing village near Visby (we hired bikes for the day)

Lovely sunsets in Visby, facing west across the Baltic Sea. There were some unusual coastal birds (unusual to us anyway) including gooseanders, mergansers, eider ducks and we even spotted a lovely little blue throat feeding amongst the rocks (bit a like a robin but with a blue throat with a red patch in the middle).

Very clear water.

Faces in the walls and buildings

Stockholm at night

Oh and we met abba...ah sadly just kidding but these were very lifelike waxworks.

I noticed that in domestic gardens, having a raspberry patch was quite popular, and there were often fruit trees too. On Gotland there's a tradition of berry picking in the countryside and I meant to ask if the tasty frozen ones served with breakfast were picked by the staff at the hotel...they had several homemade berry preserves that were yummy anyway.

That's me for the week, thanks for reading. I'm linking in with Harvest Monday kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.

Hi sue. We had two more strawbs ripening, which then got eaten by birds, doh. The rest seem a bit slower to get going (the main area of my strawb patch gets shade in the morning from my allotment neighbour's cherry tree), but shouldn't be too long now.

About Rainbow Chard

It was Easter 07 when we got our allotment - all writhing with brambles and couch grass a-plenty. From it's extremely overgrown state (it was vacant for at least five years) we've steadily tamed the wilderness into something more manageable. As we didn't capture the mess that it was in at the beginning, this is a way of recording what we've been up to recently, so we don't make the same mistakes! Lou does most of the work, with occasional help from Jan.